‘I didn’t ask them to come, darling. They insisted. So I thought we might as well sell the story to Beautiful People and put the money in trust for – is it a boy or a girl?’
Inside the warm circle of my lover and baby I felt strong enough to face my mother. ‘Girl. Gina. You can see,’ I said with wonder.
She smirked, showing off her spiky dark eyelashes. ‘Leo’s been so sweet. He just couldn’t bear to let me go. So we got my eyes done in Switzerland, my kidneys and heart in Acapulco, my face in San Francisco. Leo’s had quite a few ops, too, haven’t you, darling? When it came to the point we realized we’d been foolish to throw away eternal youth. Old age and death are really only for failures and masochists.’
‘Don’t worry about anything,’ Leo said benevolently. ‘We’ll look after you now.’
And they did. This house was still a modernized Victorian mansion then, much photographed by glossy magazines. Leo and Jenny were famous for being rich, glamorous and fashionably philanthropic. Leo kept his promise and allowed abandoned children to move in with us. Jenny’s original lost children had grown up and disappeared, but there were always more. Half of their enormous house was a refuge for homeless kids. Ben and I lived there, and our children – I had four eventually – grew up thinking that communal life was natural.
Many of the rich followed Jenny’s and Leo’s example. Their houses were less likely to be burgled or looted, and there was even a word for it: compassionalization. There were tax breaks and compassionalized houses were safer, even if they were rather overcrowded. By the 2030s overcrowding was a comfort. It was the bodies of solitary men, women and children that you found floating on the waters or stranded like garbage on rooftops when the floods went down.
When I was about forty I had an infuriating conversation with my mother, who offered to remake me in her image. She sobbed that she couldn’t bear to see my grey hairs and cellulite and stretch marks. I stared back at her, at the face and body I had longed for as a little girl, which she was now offering to buy for me. Perhaps I became an organicist at that moment. Although – as Ben used to tease me – I did accept this damned brain implant, so that in a sense I’ve always remained Mummy’s and Daddy’s girl, living in their house, my life saved on numerous occasions by their intervention. My final gesture of independence will be to be allowed to die.
For years none of us heard from Annette. She lost her seat at East Plumford, resigned from the Labour Party and quarrelled with everybody. There were rumours that she was living alone in a house near the sea in Dorset. Jenny and I searched for her and found her at last in a tiny house outside Weymouth, living alone and drinking heavily. She was old and lonely and incoherent. As I watched her make us tea with shaking hands, I thought, she’ll never change the world now. We stayed for an awkward hour, but her conversation – self-pity and bitterness punctuated with incoherent prophecies – was so disturbing that we were relieved to escape.
Then, five years later, her book was published, and it was a revelation. Every great movement needs its bible, and Life After Government brilliantly combined anarchism, ecology and feminism. It managed to be both critical and hopeful, and for millions it became a blueprint for how we should live in a disintegrating world. She coined the word organicist to describe someone who ‘channels her energy and intelligence into living with, not opposed to, nature in all her capricious moods’. Annette advocated huge non-violent protests against war, tax, pollution, debt and the global economy and insisted that resources, rather than employment, should be taxed. She ransacked history to find quotes and slogans, such as this one from the seventeenth-century Diggers: ‘This earth we will make whole so it can be a common treasury for all,’ which Ben and I turned into a successful song. Soon after Annette’s death her book became an international best-seller, just before all the bookshops disappeared. The following year my parents decided to abandon the planet.
Nobody knows how many died in the wars against terrorism or the accidental nuclear wars or the cyberwars or the catastrophes the earth threw at us, like a mother who has lost her temper with her children. People just disappeared – Rosa, Kevin, Jonathan, Alice and dozens of other friends and relations. Ben and I were instinctive anarchists, and at first there was a kind of joy in our new freedom. No more taxes, statistics, banks, schools, police, television, newspapers, supermarkets or public transport. The infrastructure didn’t melt away at once but so gradually that it was almost poetic, a slow ballet of decay. Rumours spread in frantic emails on the computers many of us still kept even after the cyberwars and via the crackly local radio stations that sprang up. The tube stations all closed, although they were covered with signs that said they would reopen as soon as possible. Then those signs went, too, and we knew the tunnels were flooded with sewage, the rails rusted, rats and maggots feasting on the last commuters.
I remember the last time I took my grandchildren, Jack and Ahmed, to school, one April morning when the floodwater shimmered from the fields of Regent’s Park to the broken, ragged eggshell of St Paul’s. It should have been a fifteen-minute walk, but there were potholes and bomb craters in the roads and pavements and our way was blocked by abandoned cars, buses and lorries. Beggars and refugees mobbed us when they saw we were carrying bags and wearing clothes that had once been expensive. We arrived at the playground – minus the children’s lunch-boxes and Jack’s trainers – to find a notice telling us the school would be closed ‘until the end of the emergency’. The mob that had followed us shrieked with delight, and in a few minutes they occupied the empty playground and school buildings. As far as I know they’re still there.
It’s years since I’ve ventured that far. Ben and I were so close that sometimes even our children and grandchildren were jealous. We all lived here comfortably enough, a self-sufficient community. The house has a huge garden where Ben, who loved gardening, grew vegetables. Suddenly your survival depended on something as arbitrary as whether you lived in a basement in Lambeth or a top-floor flat in Muswell Hill. Estate agents tried to advertise London as the New Venice, with its quaint watery streets and flotillas of rowing boats and dinghies. Then the houseboats and floating houses began to appear. Some of them are just corrugated-iron shacks bolted to rotting wooden platforms; others are floating palaces used as holiday homes by Lunies.
Those of us who lived on the high ground built higher and higher walls and stockpiled food and weapons. Non-violent direct action was all very well, but those of us who thought we were liberals found we were quite capable of killing to protect our children and ourselves. Our extended family was a kind of ready-made community – or tribe – or private army.
Even after the house was bombed we stayed here and built huts and shacks in the ruins. We looked after each other and laughed at the politicians who tried to control us. After computer voting was exposed as a scam there were no more elections or nation states. Now that there is no transport, the world, that used to be as small as it was in the song I once heard in a toy shop, has become unimaginably big again. Last winter a group of refugees came from Highgate, with tales of starvation and fever. We let them stay, in return for help in the fields, as they were all skilled people and able to build their own shelters. As for further afield, for all I know there be dragons in France and India and the United States. My mother tells me of endless wars and bloodshed – she watches our disasters as after-dinner entertainment. I suspect that most people, like me, are delighted to have got rid of their beloved leaders and are quite capable of organizing their own modest resources. Individuals are kind, but governments are callous, or so I’ve always believed. So we survive. Only I don’t want to any more.
‘Darling, you mustn’t give up.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? And how dare you listen in to my thoughts like that!’
‘I’m so worried about you. Of course, I understand how much you must miss Ben. He was a sweet boy –’
‘He was ninety-five.’
‘But you could go on for ever, like me.
’
‘I don’t want to be like you!’
‘I can’t bear to think of you dying. I’m coming, Abbie. I’m getting the first shuttle. Leo will come with me. You must come back here with us, have a break from all that squalor. You’ve been overdoing it. You need to see how beautiful life can be. Have a facial refurbishment, a jab of amnesiac, a hormonal renaissance – anything.’
‘No!’
I hold my head to stop her voice from splitting it, rocking with pain and grief. Around my chair the younger people bustle, preparing supper and putting children to bed. From the window of the hut I can see the moon, threatening me. They will come; she’s probably packing at this moment. Her virtual visits are bad enough, but this time she’ll be physically here, criticizing my life and flirting with her great-grandsons. Her voice has gone, but I can feel her will, and Leo’s, quivering in the moonlight.
Once I loved my parents, but they are not real, and I can’t love unreality. I love my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but they don’t need me any more. All my deepest feelings are concentrated on Ben, and he is dead.
Tonight I decided to die.
Down to Earth
Pierre warned me that I might feel ill as I re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, but I’m not prepared for this assault of vomiting, headaches, dizziness, anxiety.
‘You’re such a valetudinarian!’ Jenny says as she strokes my forehead.
Her arm is the only part of her she can move. We lie side by side like two hieratic figures on a tomb, strapped down, bristling with tubes that feed us intravenously and bags that catch our fluids.
‘Don’t you feel ill? You’re so tough!’
‘I’d put up with anything to see Abbie. We must persuade her to come back with us. I’ve tried talking to her, but it’s not the same. She has to see us to realize how marvellous life can be. I want to show her our house and the gardens and the fountains, introduce her to some charming people. Perhaps she’ll find a new partner and stay up there with us. For years now she’s known nothing but suffering, grief, disease, poverty. Naturally she’s depressed, but we can soon fix that.’
I gaze at the other horizontal figures on the shuttle. Most of them are metamortals, who have been sent down by their therapists to remind them how happy they really are. They will be shuttled from war zone to flood to ruined city; they will see and even, if they can bear it, touch the diseased and starving refugees. The more intrepid ones will leave the ship for a week on a Local Colour houseboat moored on a lake in what used to be London or New York. They will all be forced to holiday until they beg to be allowed to return to Luna Minor, refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to enjoy a few more centuries of pleasure.
One of the interplanetary nurses makes us all do exercises for our circulation and muscles. The other passengers look at us suspiciously. When we were questioned by the Perpetual Police at the terminal at Luna Minor we admitted that we were going down to earth to visit family, and the news that we are actually going to stay with the natives has produced a frisson of shock. I know the story that I loved Jenny so much that we gave birth to a child has become a popular legend – it was turned into a genetic opera and performed at the Metaphysical Theatre only last year – but our visceral connection with the old world is not at all romantic. I see several of the women stare at Jenny in disgust; not only did she allow a flesh-and-blood baby, a nature brat, to pollute her body, but she is returning to her primitive and unhygienic origins.
Jenny has never cared what other people think. We gather our bags of food and presents and ignore the stares that follow us to the escape chute. They whisper fastidiously as the shuttle hovers above the green hill seething with tents, huts, vegetable patches, children and animals. A nervous titter spreads as the ship flies so low that we can see a woman in a green dress breast-feed her baby, surrounded by people in rags who stare up, shouting and pointing – a gratifyingly dramatic entrance.
There’s no longer enough technology down here to build a terminal, so we are simply dumped, like manna in the wilderness. These biblical associations still pop into my head occasionally. Actually, a more appropriate simile is a helter-skelter on Brighton Pier. One sunny afternoon in about 1920 Jenny and I climb a dark wooden ladder, sniff the aroma of hot dust and seaweed and doughnuts and fried onions, sit on a couple of coconut mats and propel ourselves out and around and around, in exuberant spirals of sea beach and sky. She is between my knees, where I can bury my nose in her glossy black hair and the delicate curve of her neck and feel her lovely arse press against my cock, which twitches with the knowledge that in an hour we’ll go back to our sleazy boarding-house and make love. Jenny’s youth is an incantation that preserves a cheap fairground ride in poetic aspic.
We sit at the top of another chute and, again, Jenny sits in front of me. There is still an erotic charge between us, even if a hundred and fifty years have nibbled at her charms. The other passengers watch distastefully as we launch ourselves down to brutality.
A smell of fresh grass and shit; wind in a frighteningly uncontrolled sky; uncultivated faces coming nearer, gawping, yelling; Jenny between my knees and in my arms as we collapse on to the inflated bags at the bottom of the chute. We roll over on to the grass as the shuttle draws the contaminated chute back into its metal belly, like an aristocratic lady who has trodden in sewage, and takes off again.
I have to remind myself that some of these little barbarians are my descendants. I feel no connection with any of them but maintain my visiting-dignitary smile as I pull Jenny to her feet and face a barrage of impertinence.
‘Greedy-weedy Lunies, fled to the moony, live for ever, think you’re clever, greedy-weedy Lunies.’
‘The goons in the moon send us all their typhoons …’
‘Why did you steal our resources?’
‘Why did you steal our future?’
‘Why didn’t you stop the wars?’
‘Why don’t you send us food?’
‘Why don’t you help us clean up the water supply?’
They surround us, their faces vibrating with spite. If they really are related to us they’re surprisingly ugly. I still can’t speak, I’m suffering from Earth Returnee Trauma: the smells and sights and emotions and noise down here are, literally, unspeakable.
But Jenny, beside me, sounds quite composed. ‘We’re Abbie’s parents and we want to see her.’
They all start to yell again, and some of the faces grow wet and red and blotchy. They move even closer, we try to back away, but there’s no escape from their stinking pressing bodies.
Silently I hold out the bags of food, medication and warm clothing we have brought with us. I had planned a dignified aid-presentation ceremony, but I’m afraid we’ll be torn apart if we don’t distract these ferocious creatures.
For a few minutes it works. They stop taunting us and turn their brief attention spans to the exquisitely wrapped packages that they tear open, hurling the contents on to the grass where pills, powerfood, sweaters, coats and shoes rapidly disappear. There are more people than presents, and they start to fight, rolling on the ground and chasing each other, tearing and breaking and crushing the objects of their desire.
Jenny and I stand at the periphery of this riot our goodwill has caused. We look around for our daughter. No doubt she has been coarsened by her years in this appalling place yet she is still … I never expected to feel sentimental about a substance as gross as blood, but I do long to see Abbie.
I remember walking with her on this hillside, just after she and Ben returned from their travels, when she was a young mother and Primrose Hill was one of the green oases of a prosperous bourgeois city, when we used to stand here with her little daughter Gina and Johnny’s successor and look back at the walled mansion I had bought for us all. I wanted to live there for ever, or for as long as science granted me – a well-preserved patriarch, surrounded by my grandchildren, enthroned with Jenny who, satisfyingly, owed me everything again. Sharing my wealth with th
e homeless Jenny and Abbie were so eccentrically obsessed with seemed a marvellous way of having it all. Smug? Well, I certainly got my comeuppance. I can hardly bear to look around at this shanty town, let alone at the rest of London.
The Zen-like calm that encases me at home on Luna Minor has been shattered by the unsubtle chaos of earth. Memories assault me like these children’s voices and the oafish weather they have down here. I remember Abbie as a little girl, coming into my laboratory and staring up at me. She used to hug me, kiss me, talk to me as if I was human. I love you, Daddy. In this gallery of memories I am always in the same frame while Abbie changes from detested baby to beloved child to desperately missed adolescent runaway. With a deep breath I prepare to meet her in her hideous old age. The virtue of virtual visiting is that all this ghastly emotion is edited out.
I turn to Jenny. But while I’ve been grazing on the past something has happened. Her face is a distorted mask of grief, and the children are dancing around us again.
‘Dead.’
‘She was old.’
‘She couldn’t walk properly.’
‘You two can’t be her mum and dad. You’re not old enough.’
‘The Earthkeeper will take her away.’
‘Before she starts to stink.’
‘Earthkeeper come, take away stinkybum. Earthkeeper say, death come for you some day.’
Then Jenny collapses in my arms and I think I collapse, too. The children whoop and snap at our ankles as they lead us to the hut where Abbie lies.
Much later a middle-aged woman brings us bowls of vegetable stew and flat bread. ‘I’m Gina,’ she says, standing awkwardly in the doorway of the hut.
Another child grown tastelessly old. I used to bath her when she was about three, in the green-tiled bathroom at the top of the house that stood where this hut is now, before these houses were bombed by the Sharia Faithful or the Christian Fundamentalists or the Hampstead Separatists. Gina doesn’t look as if she baths much now.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 36